ECE516: Wearable Computing and AR (Augmediated Reality) Eye Glass

Jan. 2013, available to 3rd and 4th yr. undergrad or grad. students

Multidisciplinary course offering:

IEEE ISTAS 2013, paper submissions due January 31, 2013

Course text: "Intelligent Image Processing", by S. Mann, Wiley-Interscience

Course website: http://wearcam.org/ece516/

Course instructor, Prof. Steve Mann, General Chair of the IEEE Technology and Society conference: http://veillance.me

ECE516 (formerly known as ECE1766), since 1998 (2013 is its 16th year)

Teaching assistants:

Schedule for January 2013:

Hour-long lectures starting Mon 2pm, and Thursday 1pm: 
ECE516H1S  Mon  14:00  BAB024            Mann, Steve 	
ECE516H1S  Thu  13:00  WB119             Mann, Steve
Important dates: Each year this course is taught, times can be verified from the official schedule at: APSC 2010 Winter Undergraduate Timetable (this URL seems to have remained constant for a number of years now). Three hour labs starting Thu at 2pm: ECE516H1S Thu 14:00 BA3135 or EA302 Mann, Steve and Janzen, Ryan BA3135 is ECE DigMic LabA, but we may hold the labs, or at least some of the labs, in EA302 (Engineering Annex 302), depending on what topics the class is most interested in, etc., and what resources are needed to meet these interests.

Text-schedule summary block (cut-and-paste the below into your own reminder); 

ECE516H1S LEC  Mon 14:00 15:00 BAB024 Mann, Steve     
ECE516H1S      Thu 13:00 14:00 WB119  Mann, Steve     
ECE516H1S PRA  Thu 14:00 17:00 BA3135 (ECE DigMic LabA) or EA302

Course structure 2012 (2013 will be customized to meet the interests of those enrolled this year)

Each year I restructure the course in order to match the interest of the students enrolled, as well as to capture opportunity of new developments. Here's some recent news items (the first one's from your fellow student, Kalin):

Final exam schedule will likely appear here, toward the end of the term.

In the year 2012 ECE516H1, INTELLIGENT IMAGE PROCESSING, X, April 25, 2012, 2:00 PM, BA-3012

Links to some useful materials

Course "roadmap" by lab units and corresponding book chapters:


PDF; PostScript (idraw)

Labs are organized according to these six units (the first unit on KEYER, etc., includes more than one lab, because there is some intro material, background, getting started, etc.).

Organization of the course follows exactly like the six chapters in the course TEXTBOOK.

location of this course textbook in university of toronto bookstore:

Kevin reported as follows: 
I just stopped by the UofT Bookstore, and to help the rest of the
students, I thought you could announce that the book is located in the
engineering aisle, and exactly to the left of the bookstore computer
terminal behind some Investment Science books.

Course summary:

ECE516 is aimed primarily at third and fourth year undergraduates, and first year graduate students. 4th year undergraduates often take this course as their "other technical elective" (fourth year elective). It is often also offered as a Professional Development Course for those in industry who are looking for a new, exciting, and relavant field of study. The classes are comprised of lectures and labs (labs have both a tutorial component and a grading component, etc.) starting in January, along with a final exam in April.

The course provides the student with the fundamental knowledge needed in the rapidly growing field of Personal Cybernetics ("minds and machines", e.g. mind-machine interfaces, etc.) and Personal Intelligent Image Processing. These topics are often referred to colloquially as ``Wearable Computing'', ``Personal Technologies'', ``Mobile Multimedia'', etc..

The course focuses on what will become the most important aspects of truly personal computation and communication. Very quickly we are witnessing a merging of communications devices (such as portable telephones) with computational devices (personal organizers, personal computers, etc.).

The focus of this course is on the specific and fundamental aspects of visual interfaces that will have greatest relevence and impact, namely the notion of a computationally mediated reality, as well as related topics such as brain-computer interfaces (BCI), as explored in collaboration with InteraXon, a spinoff company started by former students from this course.

A computationally mediated reality is a natural extension of next--generation computing. In particular, we have witnessed a pivotal shift from mainframe computers to the personal/personalizable computers owned and operated by individual end users. We have also witnessed a fundamental change in the nature of computing from large mathematical calculations, to the use of computers primarily as a communications medium. The explosive growth of the Internet, and more recently, the World Wide Web, is a harbinger of what will evolve into a completely computer--mediated world in which all aspects of life, not just cyberspace, will be online and connected by visually based content and visual reality user interfaces.

This transformation in the way we think and communicate will not be the result of so--called ubiquitous computing (microprocessors in everything around us). Instead of the current vision of ``smart floors'', ``smart lightswitches'', ``smart toilets'', in ``smart buildings'' that watch us and respond to our actions, what we will witness is the emergence of ``smart people'' --- intelligence attached to people, not just to buildings.

And this will be done, not by implanting devices into the brain, but, rather, simply by non--invasively ``tapping'' the highest bandwidth ``pipe'' into the brain, namely the eye. This so--called ``eye tap'' forms the basis for devices that are currently built into eyeglasses (prototypes are also being built into contact lenses) to tap into the mind's eye.

Eye Tap technology causes inanimate objects to suddently come to life as nodes on a virtual computer network. For example, while walking past an old building, the building may come to life with hyperlinks on its surface, even though the building is not wired for network connections in any way. These hyperlinks are merely a shared imagined reality that wearers of the Eye Tap technology simultaneously experience. When entering a grocery store, a milk carton may come to life, with a unique message from a spouse, reminding the wearer of the Eye Tap technology to pick up some milk on the way home from work.

Eye Tap technology is not merely about a computer screen inside eyeglasses, but, rather, it's about enabling what is, in effect, a shared telepathic experience connecting multiple individuals together in a collective consciousness.

Eye Tap technology will have many commercial applications, and emerge as one of the most industrially relevant forms of communications technology. The WearTel (TM) phone, for example, uses Eye Tap technology to allow individuals to see each other's point of view. Traditional videoconferencing merely provides a picture of the other person. But most of the time we call people we already know, so it is far more useful for use to exchange points of view. Therefore, the miniature laser light source inside the WearTel eyeglass--based phone scans across the retinas of both parties and swaps the image information, so that each person sees what the other person is looking at. The WearTel phone, in effect, let's someone ``be you'', rather than just ``see you''. By letting others put themselves in your shoes and see the world from your point of view, a very powerful communications medium results.

The course includes iPhone and Android phone technologies, and eyeglass-based "eyePhone" hybrids.

Text:

Organization of the textbook

The course will follow very closely to the textbook which is organized into these six chapters:
  1. Personal Cybernetics: The first chapter introduces the general ideas of ``Wearable Computing'', personal technologies, etc. See http://wearcam.org/hi.htm.
  2. Personal Imaging: (cameras getting smaller and easier to carry), wearing the camera (the instructor's fully functioning XF86 GNUX wristwatch videoconferencing system, http://wearcam.org/wristcam/); wearing the camera in an "always ready" state
  3. Mediated Reality and the EyeTap Principle.
  4. Comparametric Equations, Photoquantigraphic Imaging, and comparagraphics (see http://wearcam.org/comparam.htm)
  5. Lightspace:
  6. VideoOrbits and algebraic projective geometry (see http://wearcam.org/orbits); Computer Mediated Reality in the real world; Reality Window Manager (RWM).

Other supplemental material

  1. Chording keyer (input device) for wearable/portable computing or personal multimedia environment
  2. fluid user interfaces
  3. previously published paper on fluid user interfaces
  4. University of Ottawa: Cyborg Law course See, also, the University of Ottawa site, and article on legal and philosophical aspects of Intelligent Image Processing
  5. photocell experiment
  6. "Recording 'Lightspace' so shadows and highlights vary with varying viewing illumination", Optics Letters, Vol. 20, Iss. 4, 1995 ("margoloh")
  7. Example from previous year's work: data from final lab, year 2005: lightvectors and lightspace (See readme.txt file).

Lecture, lab, and tutorial schedule from previous years

Here is an example schedule from a previous year the course was taught.

Each year we modify the schedule to keep current with the latest research as well as with the interests of the participants in the course. If you have anything you find particularly interesting, let us know and we'll consider working it into the schedule...

  1. Week1 (Tue. Jan. 4 and Wed. Jan. 5th): Humanistic Intelligence for Intelligent Image Processing
    Humanistic User Interfaces, e.g. "LiqUIface" and other novel inputs that have the human being in the feedback loop of a computational process.
  2. Week2: Personal Imaging; concomitant cover activity and VideoClips; Wristwatch videophone; Telepointer, metaphor-free computing, and Direct User Interfaces.
  3. Week3: Atmel AVR, handout of circuitboards for keyers, etc.; wiring instructions are now on this www site at http://wearcam.org/septambic/
  4. Week4: EyeTap part1; technology that causes the eye itself to function as if it were both a camera and display; collinearity criterion; Calibration of EyeTap systems; Human factors and user studies.
  5. Week5: Eyetap part2; Blurry information displays; Laser Eyetap; Vitrionics (electronics in glass); Vitrionic contact lenses.
  6. Week6: Comparametric Equations part1.
  7. Week7: READING WEEK: NO LECTURE THIS WEEK
  8. Week8: Comparametric Equations part2.
  9. Week9: Comparametric Equations part3. http://eyetap.org/ece1766/.
  10. Week10: Lightspace and anti-homomorphic vectorspaces.
  11. Week11: VideoOrbits, part1; background
  12. PDC intensive course may also be offered around this time;
  13. Week12: VideoOrbits, part2; Reality Window Manager (RWM); Mediated Reality; Augmented Reality in industrial applications; Visual Filters; topics for further research (graduate studies and industrial opportunities).
  14. Week13; review for final exam;
  15. Final Exam: standard time frame usually sometime between around mid April and the end of April.

Course Evaluation (grading):

This course was originally offered as ECE1766; you can see previous version (origins of the course), http://wearcam.org/ece1766.htm for info from previous years.

To see the course outline of other previous years, visit, for example, http://wearcam.org/ece1766_1998.html

Resources and info:

Supplemental material:

CyborGLOG of Lectures from previous year

(...on sabbatical 2009, so last year the course was not offered. Therefore, the must up-to-date previous course CyborGLOG was from 2008.)

CyborGLOG of Labs

Other background readings:

Christina Mann's fun guide: How to fix things, drill holes, install binding posts, and solder wires to terminals

Material from year 2007:

Lab 2007-0: Demonstration of an analog keyboard

Example of analog keyboard; continuous fluidly varying input space:

Lab 2007-1, Chapter 1 of textbook: Humanistic Intelligence

In lab 1 you will demonstrate your understanding of Humanistic Intelligence, either by making a keyer, or by programming an existing keyer, so that you can learn the overall concept.

Choose one of:

Ideally we would have at least one person doing each part of this project so that we can put a group together for the entire result (keyer).

Lab 1 results:

OKI Melody 2870A spec sheet

The OKI Melody 2870A spec sheet is here.

Lab 2007-2, Chapter 2 of textbook: Eyeglass-based display device

In this lab we will build a simple eyeglass-based display device, having a limited number of pixels, in order to understand the concept of eyeglass-based displays and viewfinders.

This display device could function with a wide range of different kinds of wearable computing devices, such as your portable music player.

Link to ECE516 Lab 2, 2007

Lab 2007-3, Chapter 3 of textbook: EyeTap (will also give intro to photocell)

Presentation by James Fung:

Lab 2007-4, Chapter 4 of textbook: Photocell experiment

photocell experiment and a recent publication describing it.

Example of linear regression

Today there were two really cool projects that deserve mention in the ECE516 Hall of Fame:
David's comparametic analysis and CEMENTing of telescope images:

Peng's tone generator:

Lab 2007-5, Chapter 5 of textbook: Lightvectors

Lab 2007-6 and 7

Final projects: something of your choosing, to show what you've learned so far.

No written or otherwise recorded report is required.

However, if you choose to write or record some form of report or other support material, it need not be of a formal nature, but you must, of course, abide by good standards of academic conduct, e.g. any published or submitted material must:

If you choose not to provide a written report, but only to demonstrate (verbal report, etc.), in the lab, you still need to state your source and collaboration material.

It is expected that all sudents will have read and agree to the terms of proper academic conduct. This usually happens and is introduced in first year, but for anyone who happens to have missed it in earlier years, it's here: How Not to Plagiarize. It's written mainly to apply to writing, but the ethical concept is equally applicable to presentations, ideas, and any other representation of work, research, or the like.

Year 2006 info:

Keyer evauation is posted:
Lab 2
EyeTap lab: Explanation of how eyetap works; demonstration of eyetap; demonstration of OPENvidia.
C.E.M.E.N.T. lab
Comparametrics lab: Recover the damage done by the Elipses of Evil, on the Axes of Good:

Exam schedule in previous years

Check the official site by following the most current hyperlink; in previous years (example, 2006 below) the exam schedule was given at the following URL: ECE516H1 INTELLIGENT IMAGE PROCESSING X April 17, 2006 9:30 AM BA-3004

Last day of class:

In previous year the last day of classes was April 13. Generally the last day of classes falls sometime close to mid-April, and then there's the final exam.

Course poster